it has to do with how a dollar circulates. I'm in pretty bad shape financially. I had 3 close family members get hit with major illnesses all at once. I'm still recovering and I'm not sure I ever will. What I'm saying is I spend just about ever dollar I get my hands on paying debt and buying food/shelter/transportation. There's a little discretionary funds in there for my kid. I try to let her do thing things her friends (who's parents didn't get economically cock punched non stop for 10 years) do.

Now take a Donald Trump. No matter how greedy he is there's only just so much he can buy. At some point his money is just sitting around, doing nothing. He'll invest some of it, lose some of it, etc. But He's only got so much time in the day to do that. Eventually it becomes a war chest laying around doing nothing.

When we take it even further, to the level the Waltons have achieved what we have is pretty much the dark ages. You've got a small group of folks with _all_ the wealth. They're more or less Gods (Divine Right of Kings, anyone?). They stop investing because, heh, why should they? They already have the best civilization has to offer. As a result things can really only get worse for them.

If the above sounds complicated it's because it is. That's what makes cutting the marginal tax rate so seductive. It sound like an easy answer to the world's problems. Supply side economics, right? But there really is a reason we called them Voodoo Economics...

and he basically said it wouldn't stop him from making more money. We're talking 5% of _billions_ here after all.

Erm... In countries with sane industrial relations laws the employer is directly responsible for ensuring that all the equipment provided for use is safe and the worker is trained on how to operate it. So yes, they will be the ones getting sued, however in this case, the family will only be entitled to sue if they can demonstrate the employer failed this "duty of care". If the employee forgot to set the safeties or ignored procedure, they dont have the right to sue. If VAG failed it's duty of care, the fines from the regulatory authority would dwarf the compensation claims anyway.

VAG will likely offer compensation to the employees family out of an obligation in either case (in Germany this is likely negotiated by their evil unions that dare to look after employees).

you're still living very, very well. Also, these high level marginal tax rates are about the only thing that I've ever seen that solves the problems with income inequality. Specifically how a civilization leans towards oligarchy and stagnation as a smaller and smaller group of people claim all the money for themselves. Wealth builds on wealth, and at least here in America we don't see any end to that. The pie might get bigger, but if my slice gets tinnier ever year it hardly matters...

Put another way, I saw an interview with a multi millionaire complaining she didn't have any political voice anymore because the billionaires money crowded her out...

Similar background, but since 1991, totally agree with your post, many of the older teenagers who want to "write games" are artists, not coders.

It's a 9% tax on entertainment. It's not the bloody Spanish Inquisition or the Gestapo. It's become damn near impossible to raise taxes enough to run a city anymore. The Right Wing have a name for it, Starve the Beast. Thing is a big dog is a beast, and that Beast was the only thing keeping the Robber Barons at bay. Doesn't anyone remember what laissez faire meant for 99% of the population in 1900s?

I suppose I could see them complaining if it was a flat 95%, but afaik the UK does Marginal taxes the same as the US, meaning they paid the same taxes as a lorry driver up to certain point.

Programming or playing a musical instrument is easy, doing it well enough to get paid is hard.

You mean a stateful firewall with a router bolted on?

There's nothing NAT gives you security wise that any stateful firewall can't. You have NAT? You have a stateful firewall setup. Was it a pain to setup at your router, or was it just a tickbox?

Are you suggesting splitting up large blocks and then assigning them to disperse networks further screwing up the already exponentially bloating routing tables that barely hold the internet together as it is?

I don't think you quite understand what goes into your packets making it from your computer to 216.34.181.45 so you could post that comment.

You mean like the first LG Prada which had no physical buttons and a full touch screen and came out before the iPhone?

Yes specifically licensing the technology to use cablecard. It's expensive, apparently really expensive.

Thankyou for reading between the lines. But there are plenty of clear cut answers in the CSB investigation and the OSHA reports if you bother to read them.

There's something called the swiss cheese model which describes barriers to a process safety hazard. There were lots of them, and none were time pressure based. There were engineering cost cutting issues at Hallibruton, and training cost cutting issues at BP/Transocean but no one was under time pressure to drill what wasn't even a production well.

Now please educate yourself beyond the daily telegraph.

In America he would have simply said "ahstalavista baby".

LOTO principles are based on a fundamental mistrust on other people. My last trip to an industrial plant in Germany they were confused by the concept of LOTO (talking about electrical work here, no robots). They couldn't understand why we locked things. They just put a sticker on the switch saying "Don't turn on". I asked them what happens if someone turns it on, and they replied "Why would someone turn it on when it says not to!".

Germans culture is one of following rules. The concept of having to apply a lock to something implies that someone somewhere won't follow the rules and that was foreign to them. .... at least the site I was at. I'm keen to hear from anyone else if the rest of Germany is like this too.